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Opinion Contributor

Revisiting Bill Clinton: A critical election factor

The Democratic electoral base built by Clinton 20 years ago has become a durable bedrock factor. | AP Photo

By ANDREI CHERNY | 11/9/12 4:43 AM EST

Events and elections pile up on one another, but history can only be told looking backward. Surveying the past two decades leading up to Tuesday’s election, this becomes clear: Bill Clinton’s 1992 election ushered in as fundamental a realignment of the political landscape as did the elections of 1968, 1932 or 1860. The Democratic electoral base built by Clinton 20 years ago has become a durable bedrock factor in presidential politics.

In 1955, political scientist V.O. Key wrote that throughout American history there have been a series of “critical elections” that he defined as “a type of election in which there occurs a sharp and durable electoral realignment between the parties.” These realignments shape the politics — and therefore the government — of a generation.

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Consider this: Democrats won seven of the nine presidential elections between 1932 and 1964. From 1968 through 1988, Republicans won five of six elections. Now, in the six elections since 1992, Democrats have also won at least the popular vote five times.

A deeper dig into the electoral map, however, further reveals the magnitude of the historic nature of the 1992 election. In the years prior to Clinton’s election, political analysts spoke confidently of a Republican electoral vote “lock.” States such as California, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine, Vermont and Delaware had voted for the Republican nominee in either every election since 1964 or five of six. Clinton not only won them all, but these states have never since been seriously contested by the Republicans. States such as Pennsylvania, Maryland and Wisconsin — previously genuine swing states — have voted for the Democratic nominee in every election since 1992. Indeed, in every election since Clinton won the White House, Democratic presidential nominees — once seen as irredeemably handicapped in the Electoral College — have never received fewer than 251 electoral votes.

The watershed nature of the 1992 election was not apparent at the time. Interviewed in the hours following the victory, Clinton strategist James Carville indicated that the victory was an aberration in what was still a playing field tilted toward the Republicans. “We didn’t find the key to the electoral lock here,” Carville averred. “We just picked it.”

Clinton had not won a majority of the popular vote with independent candidate Ross Perot claiming nearly one in five ballots. But in hindsight, his 43 percent victory in a fractured electorate ranks with the 43 percent captured by Nixon in 1968 and the 40 percent won by Lincoln in 1860 as the beginning of a new era in American politics.

Readers' Comments (2)

Nobody thinks of Clinton or Third Way politicians as Democrats.......nobody. He is a Reagan Liberal who ran as a progressive democrat just as Obama did. They get elected because they paint themselves as fiscal progressives when they are corporate/wealth candidates. So, what we have seen since Clinton is a failure of the media to explain to the American people that the US politics looks just like the UK's......we have Conservatives, Liberals, and Labor/progressives.

Try as Clinton and Third Way might to tell the 95% of the democratic base that free-market globalization is here to stay seeing it enriched the 5% at the rest of the people's expense......everyone knows the dynamics now. Since people were sleeping and assuming all was well it will take some time to organize, but it is clear that the Democratic leadership we have now at all levels are Third Way corporate and need to go!

To this day, I will never understand the contempt that Republicans have for Bill Clinton.

After his failure to enact any type of health care reform, Clinton set out to co-opt Republican ideas and pass them off as his own. With a Republican House and Senate, he threw many off welfare. NAFTA had exactly the effect that Perot said it would. We lost good paying jobs for a middle class electorate that chose not to go to college. However, what should have shown Clinton's stripes so clearly was his willingness to align himself with Gramm to repeal Glass-Steagall. Poor old George W didn't have a chance. The tech bubble created during the Clinton years burst at the beginning of this presidency while the housing bubble created by Republican and Democrats alike (there is no false equivalency here) burst at the end of his presidency. If George W was truly a fiscal conservative, he would have paid down the debt with the surplus instead of giving tax breaks. But old "deficits don't matter" Cheney and the rest of his neocon, military avoiding friends chose to focus us on a country that pose no threat to the United States. Seriously, it took us two decades to get to the trouble we see now. Laying this catastrophe at the feet of a man who has been president for four years shows a lack of any understand for the issues we face. I only hope that the Branches of our Government will learn to work together before the results of failures of the past are too imbedded to overcome.